Did you see the CIPR and PRCA’s joint letter urging the media to verify the authenticity of their PR sources? Can you believe it’s come to this?
The use of AI in PR is, all too often, a lesson of the old adage, ‘just because you can, don’t mean you should.’
PR needs to get AI in perspective, use it for the right things, and stand out by refocusing on its core strength, building trust and authority through human-led communication.
“AI tools are changing our industry for the better in so many ways, but their power should only be harnessed in ways that play to our key objectives to inform and persuade, and build trust and authority.”
PR’s AI challenge
It’s been more than three years since publicly available generative AI tools first became available to PR professionals. The majority (two-thirds) of us are using AI to some degree, according to Muck Rack.
We should be using AI to help with our research, number crunching, reporting, and workflow improvements.
We should also be helping our clients to contextualise their AI search visibility, a huge growth opportunity for PR.
What we shouldn’t be doing as an industry is promoting fake experts or using AI to generate impersonal pitches to the media.
“The trustworthy PRs’ names stand out in the crowded email inbox. It’s their emails that journalists click.”
Get back to basics: Build trust and authority
As a former journalist, I can tell you that there are PR agencies and professionals whom you learn to trust over time; they only approach you when they have a story relevant to your audience, can provide a well-trained spokesperson, and don’t spam you with rubbish. The trustworthy PRs’ names stand out in the crowded email inbox. It’s their emails that journalists click.
The AI era drives home what should have always been PR best practice: only approach the media when you have a relevant story to tell. In a world where trust is at a premium, the PR industry has a chance to make a real positive difference.
Aside from being the right thing to do, there’s a secondary benefit to focusing on building trust and authority. When choosing which content to surface to users, search engines and large language models (LLMs) look for content that displays experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, often called EEAT.
So, transparent content, such as customer case studies, user reviews, expert biographies, reports, whitepapers, training materials (how-to guides, FAQs, etc.), is great for search in the AI era.
How PR should use AI
In previous LinkedIn posts, I have summarised how PRs should approach AI:
✅ Understand how LLMs work
✅ Get the right tools in place
✅ Build a narrative and content strategy based around search engines and LLMs
✅ Focus on the right media (some are more likely to surface in LLMs due to agreements etc.)
✅ Use humans to write and pitch your content
✅ Be flexible, so you can pivot quickly to changing audience needs
✅ Monitor, measure, pivot
AI tools are changing our industry for the better in so many ways, but their power should be harnessed only to support our key objectives: informing and persuading, and building trust and authority.
I’ve been tracking AI in the PR industry since 2018, and train PR agencies and in-house teams on AI search(often called ‘GEO’). If your team needs training around AI and content strategy, please get in touch.
Syndicated from LinkedIn.
